All posts tagged Thornton

This was taken at Stoke Newington station on a cold autumn morning. I’d woken early to go and visit a friend on the other side of town, hamfistedly thumping at the beeping alarm clock to bring about an end to its metronomic annoyance, stumbling bleary eyed around the house, before pulling my scarf tight around my neck to protect from the London frost. I wandered through the crisp dawnlight on the five minute walk to the station, shuffling heavy feet in waltz time, dodging cracks in the pavement to ward off bad luck.

Arriving at the station I gazed down at the empty platforms, normally slick with weary commuters all now dozing their way through a Saturday sleep. Bought a ticket, change ringing against the steel tray, and made my way down the stairs to be greeted by a magpie on the opposite platform. “One for sorrow, two for joy” I thought as the solitary carrion stalker stared me down across the cold steel track. Ever ready camera in hand I ran off three shots, shutter stutters shattering the morning calm. In a graceful flurry of feathers the bird was gone, leaving me to ponder what dreadful fates might conspire to befall me through the day.

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Josh Thornton is a photographer of sorts whose hobbies include pottering around, attending car boot sales in the hope of finding expired films, and spending too much time online. He is based in a noisy flat in London where it rains, even in the summer. You can see more of his work here. His other contributions to Snake-Oil Cure can be found here.

The process involved in these works is designed to try and record an impression of my daily perception. I shoot using a Smena camera (a vintage Russian camera which has a fully manual wind and shutter release mechanism) which allows me to shoot at very short intervals across the film by winding the crank a fraction of an inch each time, which layers to create the density evident in most of these shots. A single 36 exposure film is exposed closer to 500 times, all from eye level, in an attempt to mimic the process of recording memories. I started doing this over journeys I would regularly take, like the walk from my house to the train station before and after work, and then expanded this to pretty much every journey I make on public transport. It’s a lengthy process to expose a film this heavily, typically taking a week of repeated journeys, firing shots off a few seconds apart, but I really enjoy the results.

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